Review: Apple iPhone 6s

WiredIf you want a phone that just works, get this one. Like all iPhones, it's well thought-out and beautifully made. Excellent selfie camera. Purportedly water-resistant. (I'm not checking until I do by accident.)

TiredTouch ID slays notifications, and they were already half-dead anyway.

Review: Apple iPhone 6s

WiredIf you want a phone that just works, get this one. Like all iPhones, it's well thought-out and beautifully made. Excellent selfie camera. Purportedly water-resistant. (I'm not checking until I do by accident.)

TiredTouch ID slays notifications, and they were already half-dead anyway.

There's the old mantra: Wallet, keys, phone. Many of us have said it silently to ourselves every time we've stepped out for the past 15 or so years. These essential items helped us navigate the world, but we had to remind ourselves to grab them because they weren't no-brainers like, say, shoes. When was the last time you were halfway to work before realizing you'd left your shoes at home? (Shut it, Hawaii.)

That mantra is changing, though. Maybe you're going to a store where you can pay with your phone. (If you're not already, you will be.) Maybe you have one of those connected smart locks that opens at the tap of an app. (If you don't already, you probably will.) Increasingly, the mantra is just phone.

But that's not a mantra. For those who rely on their phones enough to leave the wallet and keys inside the house, a handset has ascended to the firmament of the essential: It is as important as shoes.

Companies like Apple have banked on the inevitability of this for a decade or more. They've waged bloody battle grabbing the most space in pockets and purses. And Apple is winning because it's made the phone that the most people can use just seconds after its protective plastic comes off. Apple's phone, reliable and friendly, can now hang with shoes. The other edge of that honor is that a gadget so essential needs to shock you with novelty in order to not seem quotidian. This s-cycle iPhone does not. You probably don't care.

The iPhone, now in its 6sth (= 9th) iteration, has the most intuitive software and hardware of any phone around. It has an army of accessories waiting to enhance it. Rental-car stereos play nice with it, and hotels have chargers behind their desks in case you forgot yours. It is the best bet for almost anyone. But it is no longer the best at any one thing. If that's important to you, get a different phone. You can get more powerful ones; there are models with better screens, better battery life, better cameras. There are more exciting phones for people who want to be excited by their gadgets.

Power

Coming from an iPhone 6, the extra processing power of the A9 chipset over the A8 is barely noticeable. Games do not run any more smoothly, but the phone doesn't get as hot after long battles with Deathless foes or while ripping 10,000-meter snowboard runs.

It's worth noting, though, that most of the apps available in the App Store were designed to run on previous iPhones, so they aren't really taxing the processor. This definitely could change as developers find new uses for the extra horsepower.

The 2 gigs of RAM is a similar level of improvement. Apps open essentially instantaneously. That's a step up from the iPhone 6, where apps opened almost instantaneously. Multitasking is probably the most noticeable improvement. Double-click to see what's open, and the stacked-screens view pops up super quickly, almost before you're done with the second click.

The Camera

For most of us, this is the most important feature of every new iPhone—and phone, period. Each year since launching the iPhone 4, Apple has thoroughly owned all comers. Sure, the occasional Nokia offered optical image stabilization, but the iPhone has always rendered the most natural color, offered great low-light performance, and captured finer detail than its seemingly underpowered camera should deliver.

The 6s is no exception. It has a great rear-facing camera: 12 megapixels (up from eight on the iPhone 6), with a protective sapphire crystal lens and super-fast image capturing. It is not, however, the best camera out there. The Moto X and Samsung Galaxy S6 offer more detail. But this makes absolutely no difference until you start zooming in. Aim the camera at what you want to photograph, and you should be fine.

Joe Brown/WIRED

Its front-facing camera, however, is The New Boss. At 5 megapixels, and paired with a cool trick that flashes the screen to lighten dark scenes, the 6s will encourage countless degenerates to ruin the ambiance of your favorite romantic location with an extended arm and a pinkish pop. Here's a picture of me with a guy named Steve whom I met in a bar. We're both Lewis Hamilton fans!

Siri

Siri still sucks—or at least that's my experience. Others, including our own David Pierce, find her to be a lot more helpful. To me, Apple's voice recognition still lags even the first generation Moto X. Saying the magic words "Hey Siri" worked 29 out of 100 times for me while driving on the highway. (It was a boring drive.) When saying the phrase in public, I felt like a jackass 100 percent of the time. Once you manage to get past the vocal gatekeeper and unlock the speak-to-text powers, you often sound like a crazy person.

Touch ID

The first time you use Apple's new fingerprint sensor, your mind will blow straight out your ears. It is so fast! When you're done scraping the little bits of brain out of your pinna, you'll be like, "Wait, what were those notifications again?"

This is a legit problem. Every aspect of this phone is excellent. And while you technically could include Touch ID on that list, it's so fast that it hamstrings Apple's already challenged notifications. If you touch that sensor with a finger that you've registered, you will almost always flash right into the phone, unlocking it even if you didn't intend to. Those notifications you wanted to check? They're cleared from the lock screen and jammed into that junk drawer in the top menu along with every other notification from the past howevermany days. Useless.

It's easy to offer a Jobsian answer to this problem: You're holding it wrong. Just don't register every finger, and then, when you simply want to look at your notifications, click with an un-scanned digit. Or hey, touch the power-on/off button to see who just liked your selfie (a bot). Yes, either of those tricks will work. But by putting the onus of function on the user, you've worsened the user experience.

3D Touch

By placing a grid of sensors behind the screen, Apple's engineers allowed the new iPhones to sense pressure, enabling a z-axis of gestural input. Put another way, you can right-click now. That's pretty cool! It's currently limited to native apps and a few third-party selects, so it's hard to judge how this will play out. You can't hate on the effort put into this feature, but nothing that currently uses it really improves the user experience dramatically. Someday it might be a level of interaction you can't live without. Today, I mostly use it to see if I took a live photo by mistake.

Rose Gold

Let's get this out of the way: Apple's new iPhone color is pink, not rose gold. But that said, it is the most important feature of the 6s. Why? It's the only way you can visually tell the world that you have The New iPhone.

Pulling a Bro's Gold iPhone out of your pocket is the equivalent of walking into the office sporting a shiny new pair of Jordans. Everyone else has shoes too, but yours loudly shout out what is important to you.